Google setting new Trend

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 11 Jun 2008 at 08:39

Google has expanded its Google Trends tool with new numerical data.

The original Google Trends allowed users to create a graph comparing search terms, allowing people to get a sense of how often those terms were searched for relative to each other. However, it was only ever a sense, as Google trends didn't include numbers.

Google has now taken steps to rectify this by allowing users to download the file as a spreadsheet with scaled numbers for analysis. Rather than displaying precisely how many people searched for each term, though, the results are relative and scaled.

The daily average appears as 1.00, which means if you compare two types of beer and one hovers around 1.00 and another hits 3.00 on the graph, you know that search traffic for the latter was approximately three times the average for the time period being looked at.

Clearly the tool only works for Google searches, and you'll need a Google account to use it, however, speaking on its blog , the company claims to have high hopes for Trends: "Google Trends is not only a fun tool; it also offers some practical uses as well. Suppose you own an ice cream shop and don't know which flavours to serve, or suppose you're responsible for stocking supermarkets across the country; Trends can help you explore the popularity and seasonality of your products."